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The Raid

The morning the news broke that the United States had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, three years ago this weekend, I was pursuing a very different kind of story.

My Pakistani colleagues and I were traveling to Chakwal, an area about 90 minutes south of Islamabad, to visit a school with chronically absent teachers for an article about Pakistan’s dilapidated education system. It was the type of idea my editors usually rolled their eyes at — not enough blood and intrigue — but they’d relented this time because nothing else was going on.

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We never reached the school. Instead, we made a U-turn and returned to Islamabad before being dispatched to Abbottabad, where The Story, the one reporters across the region kept renewing their Pakistani visas for, was finally unfolding. We spent days roaming outside the al Qaeda chief’s compound, interviewing neighbors, dodging checkpoints and trying to stay ahead of Pakistani intelligence agents.

Yet, despite our best efforts, security officials never let us inside Bin Laden’s house. Key details about what had happened there came instead out of Washington, often through unnamed sources. And after what seemed to be an initial burst of credulity, many Pakistanis quickly latched on to conspiracy theories about what happened, and their amazement at the notion that the terrorist leader had lived among them morphed into anger over the U.S. intrusion on their soil.

It’s all just a drama—Osama never existed, some told us. “This is all so Barack Obama can get reelected,” one man said. Then, there was this gem: “Osama had a body double, and that’s who the U.S. killed.”

It was exhilarating and frustrating, illuminating and mystifying. Those few days in Abbottabad epitomized what it was like to report from Pakistan in general: Something (usually violent) happens somewhere, but access to the site and the players is restricted; the Americans and the Pakistanis, true to their decades-long dysfunctional relationship, each try to control the narrative, thus feeding the conspiracy theorists; and in the end, you are never sure how much of what you write is really true.

***

I thought I was ready for Pakistan.

I read books. I interviewed people. I looked at maps. I soaked up every bit of information I could before landing there in April 2008 as an Associated Press correspondent. (My posting was actually a return: I’d lived in Pakistan as a child for about a year after my family fled Iran, and I had always wanted to go back under better circumstances.)

But it’s hard to be truly prepared for a country so full of contradictions, divisions and delusions that some argue it is barely a country at all. By the time I left — actually, long before the Bin Laden raid — I was a wreck, prone to emotional outbursts, extremely cynical about religion and disillusioned by practically every actor involved in the Pakistani drama. I loved so much about Pakistan – the color, the spice, the beauty of its landscape and the generosity of its people. But I hated it for not being able to get its act together.

This is, after all, a country that has dozens of nuclear weapons but can barely keep the electricity going; where countless lawmakers — never mind ordinary people — don’t bother to pay their taxes, then complain that the United States doesn’t give Pakistan enough money; where some 8 year olds go to school and others go to work; where tossing away the business card of a man named Muhammad can get you tossed in jail on a blasphemy charge; where musicians make some of the most beautiful music in the world, and where they could get killed for it; and which technically is an Islamic democracy but where the generals still hold the real power. Even Pakistan’s legal system is confused: It has secular and Islamic sections, neither of which seemed able to convict any of the terrorists tearing the country apart. Nearly 70 years after it was carved out of India, many who live in Pakistan still identify themselves by their tribe or ethnicity before they call themselves Pakistani.

The author in South Waziristan, a tribal region in northwest Pakistan where the army was battling Taliban militants.

I was ready for the bombs, a few of which hit a bit too close. Those I felt I could handle, even if they probably scarred my psyche more than I care to admit. What really got to me was the more quotidian violence — the acid attacks, the rapes, the honor killings, the beatings — as relentless as the summer heat, as common as the call to prayer. One day early in my stay, a newspaper ran a photo of a crowd gathered around three alleged thieves. The men had been caught and set on fire, their bodies stacked like logs.

Decades of policies that promoted austere, harsh versions of Islam — brought about largely thanks to funding by the Saudis, the cowardice and rapaciousness of Pakistani leaders, and strategic silence on the part of U.S. leaders eager to see insurgents push the Soviets out of neighboring Afghanistan— had seemingly made some forms of violence increasingly acceptable, or at least tolerable, to mainstream Pakistanis. That meant daily life was ever-more frightening for Christians, Hindus and other non-Muslims, as well as Muslims deemed too secular or the wrong sect. Anyone who dared speak out in support of these oppressed groups risked death, so fewer and fewer did.

After leading liberal politician Salmaan Taseer was murdered in January 2011 because he dared criticize Pakistan’s extreme blasphemy laws, a British friend of Pakistani descent despaired: “What kind of a country is this?”

“The kind of country where people like Salmaan Taseer won’t give up,” I replied.

“Yes, but those people all get killed,” he said.

***

Reporting in Pakistan can be a logistical nightmare. The country is huge, the infrastructure spotty, the security tenuous and the population of nearly 200 million very diverse, including on the linguistic front. Major areas are essentially off-limits to foreigners, including the tribal regions where the central government has little control and where several militant networks are based. Even those of us with fairly expansive visas would find ourselves trailed by security forces in places we technically were allowed to go. Our landlords and drivers were interviewed by intelligence workers eager to learn details about our lives. Early on in my stay, a guy who simply had to be a spook showed up at our office and interviewed me; to my surprise, he spoke to me in Farsi, my mother tongue. It was bizarre.